The Board of the Bitter Hollow

The summer I turned thirteen, my cousins and I found an old Ouija board in the attic of our grandmother’s house, a creaking Victorian relic on the edge of the Bitter Hollow, a dried-up riverbed where the town’s forgotten dead were said to wander. We were bored, reckless, and convinced the whole thing was nonsense. I, especially, scoffed at the idea of spirits. My cousins, Mara and Eli, were more superstitious, but they were eager for a thrill.

Our first session was in the musty parlor, the planchette gliding under our fingertips. We asked silly questions, and the pointer spelled out answers that seemed too convenient. I thought Eli was pushing it, and he accused me of the same. But then, something changed. The air grew cold, and the planchette moved with a force none of us could fake. It spelled out, ‘I am Clara. I lived here long ago. I am lonely.’ The message was gentle, almost pleading. We felt a pang of sympathy, and we continued, asking Clara about her life. She told us of a daughter lost to fever and a husband who died in the war. We were captivated.

But Clara’s tone shifted. The next night, she spoke of the Bitter Hollow and the ‘hungry ones’ that dwelt there. The planchette moved jerkily, spelling out warnings: ‘Leave this house,’ ‘It knows you are here.’ We dismissed it as our own fear, but the board seemed to sense our unease. It began to single out Mara, the youngest and most sensitive. ‘Mara is weak,’ it spelled. ‘Mara will be the first.’ We tried to laugh it off, but Mara’s face was pale, and she refused to touch the board again.

We should have stopped, but my curiosity was a gnawing thing. I convinced Eli to play one more time, just to prove it was all a trick. That night, the board spelled a name: ‘The Hollow Man.’ It said he had been a preacher in the old town, a monster who fed on the despair of the dying. The planchette flew across the board, spelling out a litany of horrors, and then stopped. The candles flickered, and the board cracked down the middle. A voice, not from any of us, rasped from the shadows: ‘You will bring her to me.’

Eli and I were frozen. Mara was in the doorway, her eyes wide. She had heard it too. The voice came again, from the dark hallway, from the direction of the attic stairs. ‘The Bitter Hollow hungers. Bring the girl, or I will take you all.’ We ran from the house that night, but we knew it wasn’t over.

For days, we tried to pretend it didn’t happen. But strange things began to occur. Mara would wake up screaming, covered in scratches. I found dead crows arranged in a circle on the porch. Eli started speaking in a voice that wasn’t his own, reciting verses from a book of sermons we’d never seen. The final night, we gathered in the parlor, the broken board laid out on the table. We were desperate. We lit candles and tried to summon the board, to ask what it wanted. The planchette moved on its own, spelling: ‘She is the key. The Hollow Man will rise. Bring her to the hollow.’

Mara began to walk toward the door, her eyes blank. Eli and I grabbed her, but she was strong, inhumanly strong. We wrestled her to the ground, and I screamed at the board, ‘What do you want with her?’ The planchette spun, then spelled: ‘Her innocence. Her soul. It will open the way.’

The house shuddered. The floorboards groaned, and from the direction of the Bitter Hollow came a sound like a thousand voices moaning. The board splintered into pieces, and the candles went out. In the darkness, I felt a cold hand on my neck, and a whisper in my ear: ‘It’s too late.’

We managed to get Mara out of the house, but the events had scarred us. My grandmother, on her deathbed, told us the truth she had hidden for decades. She had dabbled with the board in her youth, and she had always known the Hollow Man was real. She warned us that he would never stop hunting the vulnerable. We moved away, but none of us ever escaped entirely. Mara is in a sanitarium now, staring at walls, muttering about ‘the man in the hollow.’ Eli and I carry a constant dread, a sense that something is always watching, waiting. Sometimes, at night, I hear a faint voice whispering from the Bitter Hollow, calling my name. And I know, if I ever answer, I will never return.